If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell

In this era, when indignation has replaced thought for many people, it should not be surprising that the very title of my book “Black Rednecks and White Liberals” should have provoked angry reactions and bitter denunciations, even from people who never read it.

Some whites in the South have reacted with resentment at the thought that they are being stereotyped as rednecks while some blacks resent anything that suggests anything negative about themselves. However, it would require reading no further than the preface to learn that neither most Southern whites today, nor most blacks, are considered to be part of the redneck culture that once dominated the South.

I came out of that Southern culture and could have been considered one of the black rednecks. More important, vast amounts of historical research by dedicated scholars have shown sharp differences between the white population of the antebellum South and the white population of the North.

While those differences have eroded over the generations, they have not completely disappeared among the poorest and least educated blacks living today in urban ghettos, North and South. Many of the differences between blacks and whites nationwide today are strikingly similar to the differences between Southern whites and Northern whites in the 19th and early 20th century.

What are those differences?

They include rates of violence, rates of sexual promiscuity, and — most explosive of all — differences in intellectual development. The biggest taboo that people are most afraid to talk about is that blacks do much worse on mental tests or in schools and colleges.

Some try to deny that there is any such difference, that it is all due to biased tests or bad schools or whatever other evasion comes to mind. The great unspoken fear is that it is racial.

In reality, antebellum Southern whites likewise lagged behind Northern whites in intellectual or educational achievement, though this could not be explained by race or racism or other factors used to explain similarly lagging intellectual and educational performances among blacks today.

As late as the First World War, whites from a number of Southern states scored lower on mental tests than blacks from some Northern states.

During the antebellum era, before there were mental tests, there were other clear indications that the redneck culture did not promote intellectual development.

Southern whites did not go to school, buy books, read newspapers, patent inventions, much less supply their share of leading intellectual figures, to anywhere near the extent that their white contemporaries in the North did. Nor was this due simply to poverty.

Books were not common even in the homes of many white Southerners who could have afforded books. That was just not part of the redneck culture.

My own personal experiences reinforce what scholars have shown from history. When I came out of the South as a child, I was immediately transformed from the top student in my class down in North Carolina to the bottom student in my class in Harlem.

I can remember crying over my homework because I could not do it. At the end of the term, I received a commendation card from the principal as the most improved student in the class — and I was still no higher than midway the class then.

We didn’t have books in our home and I didn’t even know what a magazine subscription or a public library was. It was common in those days for kids coming out of Southern schools to be put back a year in New York — as I should have been.

Blacks have suffered more from the redneck culture than whites have. First of all, only about a third of the white population lived in the South during the 19th century, while 90 percent of blacks did. Moreover, whites in the South had more educational and other opportunities to rise out of the redneck culture.

This is not about “blaming the victim.” Nobody can be blamed for the culture he was born into. But neither should he be kept mired in that culture, in the name of “identity” or with the pretense that all cultures are equal.

Southern whites today...are considered to be part of the redneck culture that once dominated the South.

Haha. That's a good one.

They include rates of violence, rates of sexual promiscuity, and — most explosive of all — differences in intellectual development. The biggest taboo that people are most afraid to talk about is that blacks do much worse on mental tests or in schools and colleges.

Some try to deny that there is any such difference, that it is all due to biased tests or bad schools or whatever other evasion comes to mind. The great unspoken fear is that it is racial.

No, the "great fear" (which is actually very frequently spoken) is that, if it IS racial, there is absolutely no evidence correlating a lack of intellectual development with one's racial genetics. If you want to tie blackness/whiteness with intellectual development, you're going to need more than just a correlation based on cherrypicked data and a crackpot theory about why "blacks are categorically dumber because they score worse on standardized tests" -- you're going to need sound, well-tested evidence explaining the correlation between blackness and lessened intellectual development, how that correlation *necessarily* relates to racial genetics and how it works, and why it exists.

"I'm sorry
For all the things that I never did
For all the places I never was
For all the people I never stopped
But there was nothing I could do..."

I was gonna say that sounds like an interesting read, but then I realized that 100% of the other repliers didn't bother to read or understand the point of the text, and I don't want to stick out like a sore thumb.

So I too will cherry-pick a quote, remove the context and proceed to criticize it so that it seems I am smarter than the author.

Nevermind, I don't know how to select text on a tablet apparently, my beef is that cultures are inequal. I mean that's a cultural conclusion, I find aspects of Japanese culture, for instance, to be reprehensible. That is because of the values of the culture I was raised in. Inequality in cultures exists through cultural dominance. Ie as a westerner my culture is dominant because our section of the world is militarily and economically dominant. If anothr culture (say China) becomes militarily and economically dominant, we may hear more about the stagnation and corruption of liberal democracies, because naturally our cultural dominance will be waning. Its nice to be on top.

Either way, sounds like an interesting read and certainly seems well-written.